Some Basic Ethics for Healthcare Professionals

Ethics are not optional in medicine: they are an essential and integral part of health care. A common ethical code for everybody involved in health care is potentially valuable and is to be welcomed, but the role and limitations of such a code need to be recognized. Medical ethic is the duty of the physician towards the patient a necessity to practice medicine. Since public health professionals often have to face difficult ethical decisions, public health institutions are more and more interested in integration of ethics in their curricula. Here are is a list of some basic ethics that every health worker must adhere to.

Do no harm:

A health care professional should act in such a way that he or she does no harm, even if her or his patient or client requests this. For example, banning smoking in public places may cause harm to individual smokers but will prevent greater harms through acting as a general disincentive to smoking among the wider population.

Health maximization:

Public health professionals have an obligation to maximize health in the populations for which they are responsible. Thus there is a strong requirement to focus on maximizing population health rather than on wider concepts of the common good.

Justice:

This includes a fair distribution of health outcomes in societies, which is often discussed in terms of public health as health equity. The socially controllable factors that lead to health should be distributed in such a way that the health of all citizens is protected or restored as much as possible.

Efficiency:

There will always be more health need than resources to deal with that need. So the principle of efficiency demands that health care professionals should make use of the evidence base and the performance of cost-benefit analyses to decide what should be done and how to do it.

Treating every patient as a high value:

It is fundamental reminder for health care workers that every person has a high value and cannot merely be treated as a means to the end of others’ good. This is the sole reason why governments focus on public health and the concern for individual welfare is kept aside. Doctors, surgeons and other healthcare workers should emphasis on respect for the autonomy of the patient.